The church is the hope of the world

I was out of town this week. As a pastor this is hard, you feel such an obligation to God for the church God has you serving in, I feel guilty taking any time off. I know that is a personal issue, one I must just get over. I have seen too many pastors fail to take any time off until they just wear themselves out and their bodies just start shutting down.

This often takes them out of the pastorate and can finish a career. I am pretty bad at this but working on it. I really consider myself a work in progress. This is why even when I am out of town, I go to church.

Going to church allows me see how other congregations conduct service. I love doing this it always inspires me. Today was no different. I was at Lackland Air Force base in San Antonio. This is where the Air Force gets around 700 recruits every week coming into basic training.

Now the recruits are not required to attend church, they can choose from a pretty wide variety of denominations or just not attend at all. I chose to attend the Protestant service with my daughter. The service started at 9:30 am. The Airmen however did not wait they lined up outside of the church and as senior Airmen and their families walked in they cheered. It was such a joy to see young men and women excited for the success of someone else. It was such a treat to see so many young people excited to attend church.

We entered the church in line and just sat down exactly in the spot where we were directed. Our seat just happened to be on the very front row, as a pastor I was honored to be able to sit in the very front. There was music playing and some were clapping everyone was smiling. Everyone was happy to just be in the service. The entire sanctuary was filled to capacity.. Capacity was 1,000 and it was completely full not an empty seat anywhere. They even put some Airman on stage. It is important to note these were all recruit age young people. I doubt if any of the recruits was over the age of 25. Now I was there and so were some other family members visiting their graduates. I was not able to get an exact count but the church was divided in three sections, two of them were all recruits the third was recruits with visiting family so if you do the math in thirds at least 600 young people choosing to attend service.

During the service the Chaplin explained baptism, they have a baptism class outside of service on certain Sunday’s and perform the actual baptism on the third Sunday of the month. Then he stated they currently Baptize about 100 every month.

That bears repeating every month there are 100 new young people accepting Christ in this one Protestant church. This is not the picture the world paints of Christ. The world says young people have given up on church. Church is old fashioned, out of touch and dying. Many of the worlds mainline denominations have reported attendance is trending down. If you attend a local church, young people are often not even showing up. It is easy to fall into the worlds perception. Don’t!

The Church in not in competition with the world. The Church is the hope of the world. Nobody gets to heaven without Christ, nobody. Christ established The Church to be the sole delivery system of that message. Be excited if you are active in your Church you are part of Christ work. If not, this is your call to get that way.